UAW 4811, the union representing 48,000 UC academic workers, voted earlier this month to authorize an Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) strike in protest of UCLA’s treatment of students and academic workers at the UCLA Palestine encampment.
UAW is currently on strike at UC Davis, UCLA, and UC Santa Cruz. End dates for these strikes have not been announced and strikes may be declared at additional campuses in the future. Members of Local 2010 may choose to individually honor the UAW picket line using PTO or unpaid time if their conscience guides them to do so, or if they feel their safety is threatened. However, per our contract with the UC, Teamsters Local 2010 legally cannot sympathy strike with UAW.
Every UC union, including Local 2010, is contractually prevented from holding sympathy strikes with our fellow Unions. We consider this a suppression of our rights as workers, and have been fighting in the state legislature to allow every public employee to join a sympathy strike and honor a picket line.
In the meantime, Teamsters Local 2010 strongly supports the right of every UC student and worker to protest peacefully without assault or molestation. We stand by our fellow workers and demand that the UC drop all charges against those arrested and make them whole.
"Workers and students have the same rights to free speech and peaceful protest that all Americans have. In Local 2010, we too have had to fight back against the University’s efforts to interfere with our right to protest and picket. We support our fellow workers, and the students we serve, in their right to protest peacefully. We demand that the charges against protestors be dropped and that they be made whole.”